Toward a Resolution of the Question

(Part 6 of the essay)

On burdens of proofTraditionalists maintain that given the Church’s consistent, negative teaching about same-sex relationships that the burden of proof is on the progressive to overturn that consensus. Indeed, one often gets the impression, because the consensus has (mostly) held for over two millennia, that that burden is so great as to practically preclude engagement of the issue.

I disagree: This burden is shared equally among all the faithful. Again, this issue does not rise to the level of essential doctrine. It fits within the bounds of other questions -- slavery, divorce, usury -- that Christians have disagreed about. Particularly for Protestants, who claim to not follow “the traditions of men,” whose founding involved a radical rethink of the traditions they had inherited, failing to approach this question objectively and from first principles is unsupportable.

For we know things about human sexuality that our forebears simply did not. And to think faithfully means to think well, especially when new data come to light. Moreover, empathy and reconciliation require engaging, at the level of phenomenology, with those who experience sexuality differently than heterosexuals do. The time for simplistic “statements” -- from Music City or otherwise -- by conservative evangelicals is well past.

Hence my frame in terms of resolving a question: As I stated earlier, there is a real dilemma here that needs to be addressed on its own terms. Does faithfully following Christ require of the gay or lesbian Christian a commitment to celibacy? Does it preclude their full inclusion within the life of the Church?

Some attempts by Christian progressives to justify same-sex relationshipsChristian progressives have sought to justify acceptance of same-sex relationships in a number of ways. I will present some of these attempts here, arguing that most of them fail to convince or are at least incomplete. (1)

The first is the “God is love so we can do as we would” mantra of blasé liberalism. This collapses under its own vapidity. True enough: God is love. But as traditionalists point out, “love” in the biblical sense is so much more fierce than the narcissistic “pop love” of our culture. The God of the Scriptures has purposes that transcend our fleeting happiness. Moreover, God’s love is partly worked out in his purposes for us, insofar as we are bearers of His image, coming to fruition. That means that not all things which are “options” for us -- in our late-Modern, consumerist, hyper-individualistic culture -- are good. Human nature, while flexible and resilient, isn’t infinitely so. “Reinventions” and “re-imaginings” of a self can be destructive. As with all choices in our narcissistic age, discernment is essential.

A second attempt is to consider gay Christians as akin to the Gentiles brought into the early Church. The idea, I take it, is that just as Gentiles -- in terms of identity and culture -- were taken as “outsiders” to God’s chosen people under the Old Covenant yet are now “insiders” under the New Covenant, so gay and lesbian Christians -- “outsiders” in terms of sexual orientation -- should likewise be welcomed by straight Christians -- the “insiders” -- into the Church. (2)

If this is the idea (and perhaps I’ve misunderstood), it seems hopelessly muddled. It begs the question vis-à-vis the main sticking point as to whether acting on one’s gay sexual orientation is sinful or not. The notion that sexual orientation can be compared to ethnic identity is problematic. And it beggars belief to imagine that the writers of the New Testament (e.g., St. Paul) ever envisioned, or would now approve, extending the argument for inclusion of the Gentiles in such a manner.

Another attempt is that, noted above, of lumping the Old Testament’s ban of gay sex together with its prohibitions of other practices now deemed irrelevant (e.g., the mating of different sorts of animals). However, if someone takes all of Scripture seriously, then this can only be a rhetorical ploy, since the New Testament clearly speaks to the issue.

A related approach is to understand the statements about same-sex relationships as being linked to either idolatrous or dehumanizing behaviors of ancient cultures. There’s something to this, I think. Part of the rationale of Leviticus’ interdict on same-sex relations was the “abominable” religious practices of the Canaanite peoples (perhaps to include cultic prostitution). After all, worship of Molech is explicitly referenced. And some have argued that in Romans St. Paul was talking about exploitative pederasty, not gay sex per se. No doubt Paul would have condemned pederasty, exploitative or otherwise. (3)

However these may be, it is unreasonable to suppose that Paul did not have same-sex relationships between consenting adults within his scope in Romans 1 (or in 1 Corinthians or 1 Timothy). For it would follow, from our survey of porneia, that the Jews and the early Christians had a clear understanding of what counted as licit sexual relations and what did not -- and that same-sex relations would be deemed illicit. The question of the rationale for the prohibition is of course important; strictly speaking, though, it is a separate matter than whether the ban exists. And it would seem to.

Another claim sometimes made is “that Paul [in Romans 1] condemns only homosexual acts committed promiscuously by heterosexual persons -- because they ‘exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural.’" The idea is that “Paul’s negative judgment ... does not apply to persons who are ‘naturally’ of homosexual orientation.” (4)

This raises the question as to whether the ancients had a notion of sexual orientation. The consensus seems to be in the negative, though some have made the point that we have examples from antiquity of gay men (e.g., the Emperor Hadrian) and that contemporaries would have understood such an inclination as “natural” to them. What is true is that the ancients would not have had the full picture -- developed above -- of sexuality that we now possess.

What is also true, however, is that what we read in Paul in Romans 1 concerns sexual behaviors and acts, ones that he considers to be “against nature.” It smacks of desperation to transmogrify this clear reading into one about heterosexuals promiscuously choosing to act in a homosexual manner. What would motivate a heterosexual to perform such an “exchange”? This jejune reading trades on ambiguities latent in the word 'natural'. It takes Paul to be talking about inclinations “natural” to a person, when he’s clearly talking about actions that contradict the “nature of things."

A final and related response has it that Paul’s target is homosexual lust. Again, this contradicts what the text in fact says.

These, to my reading, are the most common attempts made by Christian progressives to justify acceptance of same-sex relations. Again, they seem to me to either fail outright or to be incomplete.I shall now lay out my own case.

The Apostolic Decree​Conservative evangelicals -- who possess a deep respect for Scripture -- use expressions like “the clear teaching of Scripture” when they inveigh against homosexuality. What, then, from our earlier discussion, can we conclude about sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular from Scripture as a whole?

An excellent place to begin is with the Apostolic Decree from Acts 15. The spark for this extraordinary pronouncement was that bane of St. Paul: the so-called Judaizers, who argued that unless the Gentile converts were circumcised according to the Law of Moses, they could not be saved. (15:1) (Paul, of course, devotes an entire epistle -- that of Galatians -- to addressing these folk.) And so in its very first Council, Church leaders met in Jerusalem to consider this question.

They heard the first-hand reports of how the Gentiles were turning to Jesus. They listened anew to St. Peter’s testimony of his experience with the Gentile Cornelius (Acts 10 and 11). They heard him retell how -- by a vision of a sheet coming down from heaven filled with ceremonially unclean animals -- the Lord showed him that he should not consider any person impure or unclean.

Finally St. James, expanding upon a text from the Prophet Amos (9:11,12), argued that the Old Testament itself foretold the eventual inclusion of the Gentiles:

“After this I will returnand rebuild David’s fallen tent.Its ruins I will rebuild,and I will restore it,that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord,even all the Gentiles who bear my name,says the Lord, who does these things.” (Acts 15:16,17)

​(This is derived from the Septuagint. The original Hebrew text strikes a less inclusive tone.)

The picture that emerges of the Apostles -- from the Council notes -- is o​f a group of reasonable, broad-minded men. The conclusion they reach is superlatively tolerant:

... we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality [porneia], from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. (Acts 15:19,20)

Their ensuing letter to the Gentile believers is a model of graciousness:

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell. (Acts 15:28,29)

Seen from a human, historical perspective, Christianity would not have survived its earliest decades had the Apostles backed the Judaizers. The Apostles demonstrated a willingness to incorporate new information (the evident conversion of the Gentiles), to rethink “settled” doctrine (the Law’s requirement of circumcision), and to draw out new implications from old texts (the creative use of Amos). Furthermore, they showed a remarkable willingness to “err” on the side of tolerance and inclusion.

The Jerusalem Council and ensuing Decree provide (have provided, in fact, to countless synods and councils throughout Church history) a peerless example of how to address controversy. With respect to our topic, the substance of the Decree itself is relevant and instructive. Clearly, the Decree should not be taken as the single, defining statement for what is essential in terms of Christian ethics over Jewish ones. It was written to address a specific set of circumstances. And we have, after all, the witness of the rest of the New Testament.

Nevertheless, for all of the ink spilled over the question of what ethical requirements from the Old Testament “go over” into the New, the Decree is striking in its concision. Whereas Paul in his epistles explores the theological “whys and wherefores” of how the New Covenant intersects the Old, the Apostles in Jerusalem evidently sought a simple statement that would provide practical guidance.

Remarkably, the Decree does not recapitulate the Ten Commandments, nor the Two Greatest Ones. Nor does it offer a rough-and-ready guide to distinguishing the Law’s ritual and ethical requirements. It is a list of activities to be avoided rather than ones to be adopted. Some have seen in it reflections of the distinction made within the Leviticus Holiness Code between its application to Israelites versus outsiders. However that may be, we know from Paul that Gentile Christians are on identical standing with Jewish ones. We also know that within a few centuries few Christians were ethnically Jewish.

For a document that captures, at the Church’s embryonic stage, what its leaders viewed as Gentile practices that were essential to be avoided, it is intriguing why these in particular were banned and what relevance they have to us now: Porneia is called out, which is unsurprising given our earlier discussion. Food sacrificed to idols is likewise unsurprising, involving as it did rank idolatry. (Yet even this issue Paul treats with subtlety in 1 Corinthians 8.) I have no idea why “meat from strangled animals” is specifically prohibited; I presume it would have had deleterious associations in the prevailing culture.

​As to abstaining from blood, this is almost certainly an echo of the Holiness Code’s taboo. God speaks:

I will set my face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood, and I will cut them off from the people. For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life. Therefore I say to the Israelites, “None of you may eat blood, nor may any foreigner residing among you eat blood.” (Leviticus 17:10-12)

Later Christians have consigned the Apostles’ reaffirmation of this taboo to oblivion in a way they’ve not for porneia.

Thus the Apostolic Decree: It provides a model -- as detailed above -- for how to address a controversy like ours thoughtfully and graciously. It speaks to the question of how the Old intersects the New. It contains an example of a prohibition, apparently considered essential to the Apostles, which later Christians have seen fit to consider a cultural relic of a bygone age. And it speaks to a matter directly pertinent to our topic: porneia.

Porneia in contemporary context​As we’ve seen, the New Testament uses a particular word for same-sex relations -- 'arsenokoitai' -- while its word for illicit heterosexual sex was 'porneia'. I don’t know whether, in everyday usage, pious Jews would have lumped arsenokoitai under porneia. That is, since the former was a particular kind of illicit sex (same-sex) would they have thought of it as a kind of porneia, the common word for illicit sex? It seems a not unreasonable supposition. However that may be, it is instructive to consider how porneia, as understood by the ancients and in the New Testament, might intersect with our contemporary culture’s assumptions about society and sex.

Recall from our earlier discussion: In the Jewish context of early Christianity, 'porneia' referred to the sex practices of the libertine Greeks and Romans -- in particular, to the sexual exploitation of slaves and other dishonored females by men. In the New Testament and on into the first centuries of Christianity, 'porneia' continued to refer to sex with dishonored women (including prostitution proper). Its meaning became fixed -- in contradistinction to 'moicheia' (adultery) -- as extramarital sex in which a third party male was not injured. Hence the nature of sexual misconduct continued -- as with the ancient Israelites and the classical Greeks -- to be defined in terms of a woman’s social status.

​Observe how utterly different this cultural frame of reference is to ours: Questions of social status -- honor, shame, owning, being owned -- are central in a way we cannot understand. Society was patriarchal and male-centered to a degree we cannot comprehend. (Perhaps traditional cultures in the current Middle East compare roughly.) Children were an attendant, consistent corollary of sex. Viewed from the other end, the ancients would have been astonished to witness a society like ours: One that prizes (though often fails to achieve) equality; that has outlawed the owning of humans; that views “the patriarchy” as something old and bad; and that has broken the link between sex and reproduction.

Indeed, extrapolating the original connotations of 'porneia' -- so readily translated as “sexual immorality” in most Bibles -- into our contemporary, Western milieu seems an almost reckless endeavor. One wonders whether the distinction between licit versus illicit sex, as drawn by the ancients using the word 'porneia', can even be commensurate to any such distinction we might try to draw.

The gulf is significant: Prostitution would seem to still count as porneia. Yet the modern version is quite different than its ancient counterpart. Both the pimp and the client are more guilty of porneia -- at least given the New Testament ethic of love -- than the woman herself. Perhaps the best, modern analogue to ancient porneia is that enterprise that gets its name from the word itself: pornography. As with prostitutes, porn actors gain double-edged fame. They are alluring because they transgress sexual conventions. Yet, even in today’s sex-soaked society, they are -- with massive hypocrisy -- stigmatized.

But what about premarital sex or the modern phenomenon of long-term cohabitation? I fail to see how these meet the criteria of porneia as that was understood in the New Testament world. Both partners are equals. Whether or not the woman “counts” to a male relative is not relevant. Children are not typically a concern. Traditionalists might argue that there is shame present, that both partners are dishonored by their actions. Yet that is to argue in a circle: Our society has determined that such relationships are not, in general, shameful. And porneia had an inbuilt reference to whatever the prevailing culture thought was dishonorable.

If all this seems “relativistic,” then so be it. It is conservative evangelicals who place such great emphasis on the original meanings of particular words, as if they were linguistic atoms, when they seek to apply Scripture. This is not at all to imply that a robust Christian sexual ethic cannot be expounded and defended: quite the contrary -- as I shall seek to show later. It’s just that one can’t build such on the meaning of 'porneia' per se. The situation is too complicated. Another way to say this is that, if we want to be literal about 'porneia', then it would seem that Scripture has little to say to us in our milieu. But that can't be right. So perhaps we need to rethink our understanding of the word.

​How do these musings on the word 'porneia' relate to 'arsenokoitai'? Quite simply, if the situation is complicated with the former, then it’s fair to say it’s complicated with the latter. If a sensitive appraisal of 'porneia' casts doubt on a simplistic conception of straight sexual ethics, it is reasonable to assume the same follows, mutatis mutandis, for 'arsenokoitai' and gay sexual ethics.

​(2) See Hays, 395, for a slightly different presentation and evaluation of the idea.) ​

(3) See Hays, 398.

​(4) Hays, 388, italics his.

​​Credits for images:"Photo of black cliff" by Don Selguerahttps://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-black-cliff-912594/"Colored pencils"https://pxhere.com/en/photo/793123"James the Just" The picture originates from the days.ru open catalogue ([1]), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=329361"Photo of a tabby cat between people" by Hutomo Abriantohttps://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-a-tabby-cat-between-people-918441/